Capture the Flag, B-word
Perry pointed out that the prevalence of black poverty has increased under President Obama. Surprise!
Why is it that the further we get from slavery, segregation, and the civil-rights battles of the Sixties, the more virulent the reminders seem to become? If the Confederate flag didn’t have to go twenty, thirty, forty years ago, why now?
The easy answer is that pervasive racism has persisted longer than we thought. You can always count on a New York Times or Washington Post columnist to discourse on the prevalence of racism (is it perhaps increasing?) in the U.S. And after all, why should racism not have persisted, given the imprimatur it has received from the federal government’s own program of affirmative action? But people who think racism is rampant in the U.S. should pay more attention to the facts. A good place to start is Greg Jones’s July 7 piece in The Federalist.
Is there racism left in the U.S.? Of course there is. We are imperfect beings. Some problems are simply not solvable, which means there will always be some racism, here and indeed elsewhere—even as there will always be conflict in the Middle East.
That may sound like bad news. But the news may actually be worse. What if the problem is not just vestigially racist whites but insufficiently attentive or motivated blacks? What if the fault lies not in the easy-to-blame stars of the Republican Party but in blacks themselves?
Blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats: 95 percent of the black vote went for Obama in 2008, 93 percent in 2012. (But be careful what you wish for, or vote for: Eugene Robinson says that a black family living in the White House has heightened racial anxieties and conflicts. Who knew?) Blacks vote for Democrats and they get—surprise!—the policies that Democrats promote. See the recent speech by former Texas governor Rick Perry for details. Perry pointed out that the prevalence of black poverty has increased under President Obama. Surprise!
Yet a recent survey found that most blacks wouldn’t vote for a Republican even if the positions the candidate held were identical to those of a Democratic opponent. The survey respondents seem to lack any sense of political strategy. To the extent that they’re typical of black voters, there wouldn’t seem to be any political reason for the Republican Party to attempt to cater to whatever might in theory, but apparently not in practice, motivate blacks to vote Republican, including serious efforts to erase whatever vestiges of discrimination remain. Maybe black leaders lack political smarts, or gumption: how otherwise to explain their allowing homosexuals to hijack the civil-rights analogy to promote their own weird cause?
An imaginative black community—in other words a community not led by the likes of Barack Obama’s tax-cheating and slanderous friend, the “Rev.” Al Sharpton—might long ago have appropriated Confederate symbols for its own purposes. As early Christians stole pagan symbols, blacks could have stolen the Confederate flag.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (savor the quaintness of the unchanged name) is, if not the largest black rights organization in the country, certainly the most prominent. If the Confederate flag were such a poisonous reminder of Southern intransigence, why didn’t the folks at the NAACP sanitize it by adopting it as their emblem?
News flash: “Today the NAACP adopts the Confederate flag as its symbol. The history of the South is, at best, mixed. Slavery was the economic linchpin, the dominating force. Even so, there was a style of life that all people, then and now, could aspire to. And even so, in that South, blacks led, where they could, lives of virtue among the suffering and indignity. Today we take that symbol of the South as our own, purge it of its history of racial subjugation and hatred, and fly it proudly as a reminder of the suffering, perseverance, and dignity of generations of black Americans, and of the hope for a better life that sustained them. The South shall rise again, as a living monument to the faith of Americans, black and white, who believed in the eventual triumph of equality under law.”
Ha! First divest (with an assist by Abraham Lincoln) the Southerners of their “property” (slaves). Then capture their flag. Nice, yes?
But there’s more. Why not neutralize the N-word too? (I will substitute the B-word here for the N-word. The B-word is “Bubba,” for some, a derogatory term indicating a promiscuous, perjurious, and financially unscrupulous Southern male.)
Why don’t the Harlem Globetrotters call themselves the Harlem Bubbas? Their skill at doing things with basketballs that defy both description and imagination suggests that Earth was not their native planet. They were, perhaps still are, hugely popular and predominantly black. The Harlem Bubbas are a hot property: they were sold two years ago for an undisclosed sum.
Why not the New York Bubbas instead of the New York Yankees or the New York Giants? (Press release plagiarizes shamelessly from the NAACP’s.) Say it fifty times, quickly. All of a sudden, every kid who plays baseball or football wants to grow up and play for the Bubbas.
Why not? Ah, because then the whining might have to stop. And then what would the civil-rights racketeers, the Rev. Al Sharptons, do for a living?
No, better to keep complaining and urging blacks to vote monolithically for Democrats. Tried and true. A comfort vote. Home, home on the plantation. Where the Dems and the liberals play. And where blacks suffer still.
And where year after year it will always appear that the skies remain cloudy all day.